Sketches of fauna: a surprise to myself

I can not emphasize enough how beautiful a blessing urbansketchers and inktober have been to me. They have so subtly and profoundly changed my approach to life, words won't be enough to express it. It has been long time I have been trying to sketch every day. I am definitely not there yet. But my frequency has improved from about two per year during the dip of the 2000s, to at least one in a week. I think it will take me at least an year to move towards sketching every single day, but I am confident that one day I will reach there.

For someone, who by nature and by conditioning tries to make a perfect piece, shifting to just doing something has been challenging. Lot of unlearning, remembering, and relearning is going into that. On many moments where I sat down to sketch, and did not have anything in particular in mind, I some how picked up a creature. It has surprised myself a lot, because I do not consider myself as an animal lover. The fact that I instinctively reach out for an animal surprises me a lot. It is a weird feeling, "Really? hmm.. interesting, but how?"  I have not still sorted the puzzle, but it is a good discovery for myself. Here are some of the sketches. Most of them are photo references, a few are sketches from real-life animals. Now, at this moment, I realised, I don't go for animals when I am out and doing urbansketching. I go for them when I am trying to sketch some idea. Hmm... interesting :)

The kangaroo was a start. I have by now, become really comfortable with the light yet bright undertone of orange pencil color followed by black pen style of sketches, although I have tried every now and then with different undertones. It allows me to let loose and later hide the trials, gives an illusion of color, and yet give a sense of completeness. I think, I am going to stick with this style for long time.

 

 

The horse and two images of a barn dog are real-life sketches. A colleague of mine was kind enough to invite me to her horse-riding session. This was the horse she was grooming before taking her for a ride. I was surprised that this does actually look like the horse I sketched. After doing a few gesture sketches during the horse-riding session, I got bored and came out to sketch the barn dog. He was so fat, overfed, and lazy! He would sleep, and then turn around, and sleep again! There were two cats too, but did not get enough time to sketch them.

 

 

The weaver bird (Baii Chadhei in Odia) and Greater Coucal (Kumbhatua in Odia) are an attempt to participate in Worldwatercolormonth in June of 2018. I did the sketches entirely using watercolor brushes, without and pencil and pens. That kind of surprised me about my muscle memory. I had learned such painting when I was a kid, and lost the habit since then. I loved both the paintings and had a great time painting them. But a few more paintings later, I stopped participating in the month long painting challenge. And funnily enough, I am not ashamed about it , like "whatever..".

I love watching squirrels. I think squirrel-watching deserves to be a hobby in itself :) They also bring fond memories of drinking juice in the huts near canteen in IIIT, the backyard of our village, the coconut trees in our Aunt's backyard.

I don't remember why I wanted to sketch a panda, but its outcome was impactful. Everyone agrees that Instagram likes are kind of addicting. There have been many sketches in which I have spent significant amount of effort, but have got much fewer likes than the panda and squirrel, into which I put very little effort. They made me appreciate the lack of connection between effort and outcome. It happened around the same time, when I was puzzled by similar scenarios at work. What I considered hard work was not being appreciated so much, but what I did not give much thought into, and just did without thinking much, garnered a lot of appreciation. And when I discussed this with my manager, he said, "Just take it when it comes". And I am slowly learning to appreciate outcomes as they come and not read too much into them.

 

I kept thinking of a herd of elephants for some reason, and was compelled to pull out my sketchbook and sketch them one day. It was not perfect, I did not have the right pen with me, but "Hey! At least I did it!"

 

One day, I went to an urbansketcher meetup at Westlake Station, Seattle. While I was sitting in a corner and sketching, a lone explorer pigeon kept coming close to us. I did a few gestures of the bird, but could not do any proper sketches because of its constant rapid movement. So, I had the remainder of the page empty, adding "sketch a pigeon" to my TODO list. I sketched it recently, after many many days.

I am still not over the "its interesting...." mode. Let's see if I am sketching more of animals in future :)